Gesundheitsregionaachen.eu

October 1st, 2018

The design agency VISUELL asked me to do a relaunch on WordPress basis for the health region Aachen. The design concept was delivered by the agency. In addition to the implementation of the relaunch, an employee training in the form of a workshop for the employees of the health region should take place.

Pattern Library

The design concept included an extraordinary amount of design patterns that had to be transferred into a logic. Users should be able to use the patterns as freely as possible, with combination possibilities and options for variations.

Usability for the backend

For the easy maintenance of the content by the authors, I have thought of various "flows". Through these flows, many posts could be automated. For example, the news, events, focal points, partners, projects and employees were outsourced to their own custom post type (CPT), so that the maintenance could take place separately from the general content. Dependent outputs were then generated from the CPT in several places on the website.

Must-Use Plugins

Yes, I know there are a lot of great plugins out there, however one of my divises is "More plugins, more bloat, more security problems, more crap". So I developed a small simple collection of necessary extensions which I deposited as plugins in "mu-plugins". This included:

  • Newsletter subscription

  • ACF Auto-Update

  • ACF Exporter

  • Backend modifications

  • Theme debugger

  • Google Maps integration

  • Theme options page

Performance

Compared to the previous Typo3 website, a doubling in website performance could be achieved. In addition to simple measures, such as moving to PHP 7.2 with caching and MySQL 5.7, Sage supports a proper caching system with Laravel Blade as the template foundation. I also put a development focus on reusable code and template parts.

Technology stack

In summary, I was able to draw on the latest tools and libraries to deliver a decent WordPress instance. I love such liberties to shipp neat "bad-ass" systems. Here's an overview of the technologies used:

  • Sage Starter theme with Laravel Blade template engine.

  • VueJS for the slideshow on the homepage (configurable in the backend)

  • Bulma CSS as lightweight SCSS library

  • Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) for creating fields and settings pages

  • and much more